A state-certified caregiver has been convicted of sexually exploiting a minor while employed by an Iowa nursing home.
The defendant in the case, Martell Guider, is a 37-year-old male certified nursing assistant who has been accused of sexual impropriety at three Iowa nursing homes located in Audubon, Correctionville and Kalona.
The most recent case, and the only one in which criminal charges were filed, involves Guider’s employment at the Pleasantview Home in Kalona.
According to police and prosecutors, officials at Pleasantview confronted Guider sometime in January 2024 after multiple employees raised concerns that he was being inappropriate with a 17-year-old minor who was present at the home but not a resident.
Police allege that after his supervisors talked to him about the complaints, Guider shared an explicit photo of the minor with his employer. According to the police, Guider had threatened the minor to induce her to send him the photos via the social-messaging platform Snapchat.
Police allege that when asked about the photos, Guider acknowledged he had saved them for his sexual gratification, saying, “I screenshot it because, it’s like, OK, yeah, it’s a woman, she sent you a naked picture, wanna look at it maybe later when we have time.”
According to the police reports, Guider’s colleagues at Pleasantview also complained that he had been making unwanted advances toward female coworkers in the nursing home. He was then barred from the care facility, according to police.
Guider was charged with sexual exploitation of a minor by causing the minor to engage in a sex act, sexual exploitation through the use of photographs, possession of material depicting a minor engaged in sex, and first-degree harassment.
In October, a jury convicted Guider of sexual exploitation by causing the minor to engage in a sex act. He was acquitted of the remaining charges, and was sentenced to five years of probation. A 25-year prison sentence was suspended by the court.
District Court Judge Michael Carpenter recently denied Guider’s motion for a new trial, stating, “A sexual photograph of a minor shared by text message or social media can find its way to the internet and live forever. A defendant who solicits a minor to create a pornographic image of herself is victimizing a vulnerable victim in a way that causes a special sort of harm.”
Guider has since appealed his conviction to the Iowa Supreme Court.
April 2023: The Audubon case
Prior to his arrest in the Pleasantview case, Guider was fired from two other Iowa nursing homes amid allegations of sexual impropriety.
The first of those cases dates back to April 2023, when a female caregiver at Audubon’s Friendship Home filed a complaint with the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing about Guider’s behavior.
The woman – who filed similar complaints with management at the home and with city police – alleged Guider had been making suggestive remarks to female coworkers, had sent them photos of himself masturbating, had recorded video of one worker as she provided care for a resident, and had invited some of his female colleagues out to his car where he kept a bottle of Seagram’s Crown Royal.
Audubon police have acknowledged they fielded at least two complaints about Guider’s conduct at Friendship Home but didn’t pursue the matter.
Audubon Police Chief Coby Gust said the complainants provided text messages and photos and expressed concern that the man’s behavior could spill over into his interactions with vulnerable residents.
“It kind of just fell off the radar as far as anything being pursued,” Gust told the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
According to the complainant in the Friendship Home case, officials at the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing rejected her complaint about Guider in April 2023, allegedly telling her the issues she raised were best addressed by management at the home since they involved worker-to-worker conduct that had no actual or potential impact on residents.
The complainant provided the Iowa Capital Dispatch with screenshots of Guider’s alleged text messages, which include two photos of a man’s genitals and two photos of a man holding a bottle of Crown Royal inside a vehicle.
